January in Shanghai

When I started this blog 22 months ago, my intention was to capture and share (hopefully interesting!) stories about our move from the UK to China, our new life in Shanghai and our travels around Asia. Reflecting back, I’ve focused much more on the latter! Our new base has provided a brilliant opportunity to more easily explore South East Asia and we’ve grasped this with both hands, visiting many cities in mainland China and also in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia – I’ve enjoyed sifting through the hundreds of photos after each trip and recording my favourites here. In the beginning our followers were colleagues, friends and family but now we have readers from all around the world!

While we have some amazing trips in the pipeline for 2018 – including Goa, India for Chinese New Year and Japan later this year – I also want to capture more of the normal stuff – what it’s actually like to live as an expat in Shanghai. This is our last full calendar year here, so I’m aiming to write a monthly ‘non-holiday’ post (I smashed Dry January, so in comparison this goal will be a piece of cake… right?!). Without further ado, here are my January diary entries.

We moved offices: Lujiazui to New Bund

On my first working day in China back in April 2016 I caught the metro from Shanghai Library to East Nanjing Road, then changed to Line 2 to cross the Huangpu river to the Lujiazi Business District. I looked up at the Mirae Asset Tower – my new Monday-to-Friday home – gleaming in the April sunshine; it was a world away from where I had worked in Coventry in the UK!

Lujiazui is the central business district of Shanghai, home to iconic and shimmering skyscrapers including the Shanghai Tower (the world’s second tallest building). It’s a cool place to work, with huge malls, luxury hotels and restaurants catering to every kind of appetite and budget. However, it’s ‘business district + tourist hot-spot’ status in such a vibrant and fast-paced city meant that it was also incredibly crowded (Line 2 in rush hour was less than fun!)

The ‘powers that be’ in government seem to have acknowledged that Lujiazui has reached capacity and in response have begun construction of the “New Bund” – a burgeoning new financial district around 14km south downriver from Lujiazui. Keen for a bit more space and shiny new facilities, we moved into our new office in the New Bund World Trade Centre (next door to the Oriental Sports Centre) on 2nd January. At the moment the view from our workplace is a 360 degree panorama of a construction site so it’s not quite as glamorous as our previous home, but it’s definitely got potential – and more importantly, it’s cut a valuable 10 minutes off my commute! I’m looking forward to watching it grow and change over the next year or so.

View from the new office

View from the new office

Celebratory cake!

Our new office (well, 5 floors of this building)

Outside the Oriental Sports Centre metro station

The Oriental Sports Centre

The New Bund World Trade Centre

Shared Bikes

Another change this month has been the mass culling of shared bikes from the streets of downtown Shanghai.

When Matt and I moved here in April 2016 we noticed the orange-and-silver Mobikes lined up in neat rows along most streets. These GPS-enabled bikes which you (a) unlock via a smartphone app, (b) use as long as you want, and then (c) leave anywhere, took off in a big way and over the course of 2017 the sector exploded. Multiple new brightly coloured competitors joined the fray at breakneck pace, most notably the canary yellow OFO (my bike of choice).

It’s easy to see why they are so popular; they cost next to nothing (just a small deposit plus a negligible fee-per-use) and Shanghai is as flat as a pancake so there is zero effort involved. Their popularity hasn’t been limited to Shanghai and it’s estimated that there are now 10 million shared bikes on the streets of Chinese cities, operated by more than 30 companies (between them, Mobike and Ofo take up more than 90 percent of the market).

The explosion of this highly convenient facility had it’s down side. Pedestrian walkways in certain areas became clogged with bikes making it difficult for pedestrians, especially near popular tourist spots or near metro stations, and by the back end of last year you could hardly walk down Wulumuqi Lu for the unsightly jumble of bikes cluttering the pavement. We even caught a few examples of some interesting attempts to ‘stack’ bikes.

Over the last month there has been a crackdown following new government regulations which aim to regulate the industry. The photo below is taken from outside our apartment building, where until recently we could easily pick up and drop off bikes. Many upmarket shopping areas or residential areas have banned shared bikes and cordoned off parking areas. It’s been interesting to witness this explosion and counter reaction in such a short space of time, and this January we’ve seen the tipping point when the highly social idea of shared bikes suddenly began to be perceived as anti-social.

You might experience something similar in your home town – see this interesting article from the Guardian newspaper last year

Weather

I’m British, so i’m genetically obliged to talk about the the weather. Around October and November last year our colleagues started to predict that this winter would be a particularly harsh one – much colder than last year – and that it would impossible to get warm due to the damp air. What they didn’t predict was the snow! The first snow in Shanghai in around 5 years. It fell for 2 or 3 days and didn’t stick around for long, but that didn’t stop a social media frenzy and snowmen/snowrabbits popping up everywhere!

Snowy Shanghai street

The view from my new office

Snow-bunny (I think) near my apartment

As temperatures drop, people turn up the coal-powered heating in their homes and workplaces causing pollution levels to rise. The naturally overcast winter weather traps the pollution beneath the cloud line, and so China’s major cities become shrouded in a blanket of smog (especially the heavily populated Eastern cities such as Shanghai and Beijing). The government are conscious of this and during times of particularly bad pollution the production in factories is suspended (I have read that that are also investing in clean energy sources, and there is evidence the air quality getting better year-on-year). Even so, on Saturday 20th Jan when the Air Quality Index (AQI) spiked at 216, I took the opportunity to stay indoors and have a duvet day!

Annual Party – A Fantasy World

Friday 26th January 2018 saw the most eagerly anticipated event on the company calendar: The Annual Party. The theme was ‘A Fantasy Journey’, with fancy-dress strongly encouraged – the result was spectacular!

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I opted for Alice, as it saved me having to buy a wig. I’m now quite confident that if the HR gig doesn’t work out, I would go down a treat at Disneyworld (and they have one in Shanghai, Bonus!).

The team performances were seriously impressive – from human shadow-puppets to sumo-wrestlers! There was even a rendition of the ‘pineapple pen’ song (google it).

My favourite restaurant this month: OHA Eatery

I want to try and visit a new place to eat each month. Ideally a brand new restaurant, but failing that, at least somewhere we’ve not eaten before. To say that the food & booze scene in Shanghai is competitive is an understatement. There is so much choice, with new places opening every week, that restaurants have to really bring their A-game; as a result we rarely have a bad meal out. Trends sweep into the city and one current trend is for ‘izakaya’ (informal Japanese pub-style restaurants). One such place – OHA Eatery – opened a short walk from our apartment so we went to check it out.

The space: Small and cosy, with one U-shaped bar-table down the middle. It felt more like someone’s dining room than a commercial restaurant, and the service was in line with this – warm and welcoming but not overly personal.

The food: The menu, printed on a small piece of creamy paper contained a curated selection of Guizhou-inspired dishes (often using ingredients from the Southwestern province). We ordered 5 dishes, and almost licked the plates clean they were so delicious (My favourite was the stuffed baby squid with calamansi lime and soy). Walking out we agreed that we would need to go back soon to try the other half of the menu – always the true test in Shanghai where places can peak early and then lose their edge. That said, I’m looking forward to returning here already – maybe this evening!